Our first analysis and paper on rainforest reassembly focuses on ants. During his PhD thesis, Phil Hoenle collected and identified a total of 283 ant species from litter, ground and tree trunks in 61 plots. The diversity was relatively high even in the agricultural sites, but ant community composition and traits differed strongly from the old-growth forest. With recovery of secondary forests, however, levels typical for old-growth forests were reached after 29 years in abandoned pastures, and even in 21 years in former cacao plantations. The accepted article, data and R-code are now out in Ecological Applications:
Also see press release by TU Darmstadt here and a feature by the FAZ.
